Consumer Guide Album

Sonic Youth: A Thousand Leaves [Geffen, 1998]
This record is what it seems--mature, leisurely, rather beautiful, perhaps content. But it's neither complacent nor same-old, and after it's settled into their, I'm sorry, oeuvre, it will rank toward the top for everybody except permanent revolutionaries, a noncombatant category if ever there was one. Awash in connubial ardor and childhood bliss, undergirded by the strength-through-strangeness of angry tunings grown familiar, it's the music of a daydream nation old enough to treasure whatever time it finds on its hands. Where a decade ago they plunged and plodded, drunk on the forward notion of the van they were stuck in, here they wander at will, dazzled by sunshine, greenery, hoarfrost, and machines that go squish in the night. The melodies aren't the foci of the 11-tracks-in-74-minutes--more like resting places. But even when the band is punk-rocking le sexisme or pondering the trippy fate of Karen Koltrane, the anxiety the tunes alleviate is never life-threatening. Motto, and they quote: "`We'll know where when we get there.'" A+